Twenty years ago, a small independent film was released without any reaction. In its opening weekend it ranked 22sd at the box office, naturally behind such valuable classics as “Final Destination 2 and “Kangaroo Jack”. It was very good, since its budget was only six million dollars. This is a rounding error on most productions, or what Marvel might spend on towels for their stars’ dogs.
And then the strangest thing happened: absolutely nothing. Most films are expected to gross less after their opening weekend, but this little film stuck around, like a guest who can’t understand the social cues that the party is over. By the end of 2003, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” had grossed $360 million, which, adjusted for inflation, is roughly the GDP of Greece itself.
In an industry where box office predictions are calculated down to the penny, this was beyond the realm of possibility. Accountants and critics alike had a hard time understanding why this quaint romantic comedy about a Greek girl marrying a WASP boy was making the numbers for a movie set in Gotham. But the answer was just as obvious as the source; they could have simply asked the aunts in our country, who turned out to be his most loyal customers.
For all the talk of the great American novel, there is only one true story in this country: someone from a quiet family marrying someone from a noisy family. This has certainly happened again to satiation in my Croatian brood, because we had gotten into the habit of introducing Protestants with inner voices into a Catholic world of overlapping questions. An apocryphal story goes that my great-uncle walked into the kitchen and saw his future father-in-law carving up a live octopus, which had wrapped itself around his arm for dear life. My uncle stayed for this dinner, which meant he had no excuse to miss a meal afterwards.
Too often in movies, relationships take place in a vacuum. Two young professionals (who never seem to work) fall in love in the big city without any witnesses, a tree falls in Brooklyn without anyone hearing. All the lovers believe they are alone in the world, a delicate fantasy shattered when the time comes to negotiate wedding invitations.
A person is more than their legacy, but subtracting that legacy leaves only differing opinions on HBO programming. To love a person is to love what made them, well, them. Love is not a world in itself, but rather a collision of planets, and the rubble of families, ethnicities and traditions scattered afterwards is called a marriage. “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” was one of the few films to understand this universality and be rewarded accordingly.
Today, twenty years later, “My big Greek wedding 3” continues the Big Fat saga. Toula (Nia Vardalos, who also wrote and directed the film) and her husband Ian (John Corbett, who did neither) travel to Greece with their daughter and other loved ones for a family reunion. The original film was hardly subtle, but good at spotting the obvious details that most of us have learned to ignore. This latest installment isn’t just about foreign but broader, with goats, creepy old babas, europop dance numbers, and even another Greek wedding hastily crammed in to satisfy the brand. I have no reason to approve of it, other than my own pleasure personal, which has more to do with a character flaw than with its hidden charms.
Nia Vardalos and John Corbett in “My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3”. (Courtesy of Yannis Drakoulidis – © 2023 Focus Features, LLC)
But MBFGW3 (as the kids call it these days) still grapples with the ethnic American experience in a way not common in today’s cinema. The first film was about Toula reconciling her need to break free from the yoke of her family, while loving that thumb in return. It was a return to tradition, but on its terms. But when she returns to Greece, we sense that she is looking for answers as much as a vacation.
With her father recently deceased and her mother suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, she is now the head of the household that has defined her entire life. But getting older is simply learning the same terrifying lesson over and over again: that no one is in charge and that your elders were probably doing it alongside you.
The proposed solution is a retreat into the past, full of meaning in relation to a sterile present. Never mind, the old family village is empty, the ancestors having left for a reason. (I remember visiting the old church in my family’s equally sparse ancestral village in Croatia. As I leaned over to read a headstone, a large black snake looped around from behind and sent me running back towards America. If God is an author, then sometimes he is as quiet as Dan Brown.)
The film is blindly in love with yesterday, including its own. The opening credits are filled with “family photos”, by which I mean stills from previous films. Cynics might call this film a money grab, but I’m a polite guy and will call it a trip down memory lane. No one is immune to the pleasures of nostalgia, me included. But history as a crutch is almost as dangerous a notion as history as chains. As the first film says, “don’t let the past dictate who you are; but let it be part of who you will become. In other words, nostalgia is like a hot bath; sure, it’s delicious, but you still can’t drink it.
We are left with another “Greek myth”, according to which a trip to the homeland cures all the ills of atomized America. But most Greek mythology ends with the gods turning you into a crab for sneezing in their general direction, so I’ll wait until the fourth marriage to declare a happy ending.